UMTS is one of the candidate technologies for next generation mobile communication systems, and its architecture is depicted in FIG. 1. UMTS is composed of a Core Network CN 100 which is connected with interface Iu to the radio access network UTRAN 110 (UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network). The UTRAN 110 is on the other side connected to the User Equipment UE 120 with interface Uu.
As can be seen from FIG. 2, the UTRAN 110 consists of a set of Radio Network Subsystems RNS 200 connected to the Core Network CN 100 through the interface Iu. Each RNS 200 consists of a Radio Network Controller RNC 210 which is responsible for the Handover decisions that require signaling to the User Equipment UE 120. Further, the Radio Network Subsystems RNS 200 comprise base stations (Node Bs) 220 which are connected to the Radio Network Controller RNC 210 through an interface Iub. Inside the UTRAN 110, the Radio Network Controllers RNC 210 of the Radio Networks Subsystems RNS 200 can be interconnected via a further interface Iur. The interfaces Iu and Iur are logical interfaces. Iur can be conveyed over a direct physical connection between the Radio Network Controllers RNC 210 or virtual networks using any suitable transport network.
The control plane signaling of Layer 3 between the User Equipment UE 120 and the UTRAN 110 is handled by the Radio Resource Control RRC layer. Besides others as conveying broadcast information, establishing radio bearer, controlling radio resources, the RRC is also responsible for User Equipment UE measurement reporting and control of the reporting. The measurements performed by the User Equipment UE 120 are controlled by the RRC layer in terms of what to measure, when to measure and how to report, including both UMTS air interface and other systems. The RRC layer also performs the reporting of the measurements from the User Equipment UE 120 to the network.
In data communications systems, error detection incorporated with Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) is widely used for error control. The most common technique for error detection of non-real time services is based on hybrid ARQ schemes which are a combination of ARQ and Forward Error Correction (FEC).
FEC introduces redundancy into a block of information bits of length k to form a coded block of length n, before transmission. The redundancy helps to combat errors at the receiver.
A transmitter which performs forward error correction is depicted in more detail in FIG. 3. The input data which are to be transmitted are first buffered in buffer 300. When there is data in the buffer 300 and the transmitter is assigned a physical channel for transmission, the data is encoded in the FEC encoder 310 thereby generating a mother code. The mother code or all the code words (code segments) of the mother code are then forwarded to the modulator 330 and the spreader 340 (in case of a Code Division Multiple Access CDMA system), shifted to the radio frequency RF by the RF circuit 350 and transmitted via the antenna 360. If Type II/III ARQ (described below) is used the transmitter further comprises a code word buffer 320 since different code words are sent in the retransmissions.
Turning now to the ARQ technique, the most frequently schemes used in mobile communications are the stop-and-wait (SAW) and selective-repeat (SR) continuous ARQ schemes. If an error is detected by Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), the receiver requests the transmitter to send additional-bits. A retransmission unit of the Radio Link Control RLC layer is referred to as protocol data unit PDU.
A transmitter arranged for being operated according to ARQ schemes is depicted in FIG. 4. Since the transmitter has to be able to receive requests from the receiver, the transmitter comprises a duplexer 400 which allows for using one antenna 360 for transmission and reception. When the transmitter receives a signal, it shifts the signal with the RF circuit 410 into the base band, despreads the signal in the despreader 420, forwards the despread signal to the demodulator 430, and extracts an ACK/NAK signal from the demodulated data. An ACK message informs the transmitter that the receiver was able to successfully decode the transmitted PDU. A NAK message informs the transmitter of a decoding error. Depending on whether the transmitter receives an ACK or a NAK, the ACK/NAK extractor 440 accesses the code word buffer 320 for retransmission purposes or will release the memory if an ACK has been received.
Referring now to FIG. 5, the flow chart illustrates in more detail the process performed by the receiver. In step 500 the receiver receives a code word which is then stored in step 510. When code words have been previously transmitted, the received and stored code word may be combined with a previously transmitted code word of the same data unit, in step 520. It is then decided in step 530 whether the PDU can successfully be decoded. If so, a positive acknowledge message ACK is sent back to the transmitter and all the stored code words of that PDU are released (step 540). Otherwise, a negative acknowledgement message NAK is sent (step 550) to request a retransmission.
Depending on the bits that are retransmitted, three different types of ARQ can be distinguished:    Type I: The erroneous PDU's are discarded and a new copy of the PDU is retransmitted and decoded separately. There is no combining of earlier and later versions of that PDU.    Type II: The erroneous PDU that needs to be retransmitted is not discarded, but is combined with some incremental redundancy bits provided by the transmitter for subsequent decoding. Retransmitted PDU's sometimes have higher coding rates and are combined at the receiver with the stored values. Thus, only little redundancy is added in each retransmission.    Type III: this ARQ type differs from Type-II ARQ only in that every retransmitted PDU is now self decodable. This implies that the PDU is decodable even without forming the combination with previous PDU's. This is useful if some PDU's are so heavily damaged that almost no information is reusable.
The schemes II and III are more intelligent and show some performance gain because they have the ability to adjust the coding rate to changing radio environments and to reuse redundancy of previously transmitted PDU's. Such Type II/III ARQ schemes are in the following referred to as “incremental redundancy”. The separate versions of the PDU's are encoded differently in the physical layer to increase the coding gain for the combining process. These different portions of the overall code will be called code blocks or code words.
As the ARQ schemes II and III put severe requirements on the memory size to store the soft decision values for subsequent combining, it has been proposed to introduce a very fast feedback channel. The feedback channel is used for sending the ACK and NAK information from the receiver to the transmitter. Usually, there is some round trip delay involved until an ACK or a NAK can be sent because this information is gathered in status reports. It has therefore been seen beneficial to send the feedback very fast by the physical layer directly without an involvement of higher layers such as Radio Link Control RLC. If a NAK has been received, the transmitter can send the next code block with a minimum delay. Thus the number of code blocks that have to be stored are kept very small and the overall delay is decreased.
Because of the limited spectrum resources, future mobile communication systems will be adaptive to the radio environment. The transmission parameters such as modulation, data rate, spreading factor, and the number of spreading codes will be based on the current channel conditions.
However, in Frequency Division Duplex FDD systems the transmitter usually have only little knowledge of the channel conditions experienced by the receiver. If there is some traffic from the receiver to the transmitter on the reverse link, measurements on this traffic will not be reliable since they are made on a different frequency. There are also measurements that can be made in the transmitter. One of such measurements e.g. for the node B is the transmitted code power which corresponds to the transmitted power to a certain User Equipment UE 120. Since the transmit power is controlled by UE power control commands, it follows the channel conditions and tries to compensate for channel attenuation such as pathloss and fading. Nevertheless, such transmitter measurements might not be meaningful under certain conditions.
Prior art adaptation techniques are often based on measurement reports that have to be sent from the receiver to the transmitter. Radio Resource Control RRC can configure such kind of measurements that will then be reported from the UE 120 to the Radio Network Controller RNC 210. These measurement reports introduce additional signaling overhead that has to be transmitted over the air. A continuous measurement reporting is therefore disadvantageous for adaptation purposes since it introduces too much interference on the reverse link. On the other side, if reporting is not done continuously there will be a delay at the transmitter so that adaptation cannot be performed accurately according to the present channel conditions.
Another prior art adaptation technique in simple ARQ systems is based on ACK/NAK transmissions which are already available in the transmitter. If a high number of NAK messages are received, the transmitter can for instance reduce the code rate. In systems using incremental redundancy this is however disadvantageous because hybrid ARQ Type II/III inherently involves a high number of retransmissions, i.e. a high number of NAK messages.
While incremental redundancy can already be considered as an adaptive coding scheme there is still a need for further adaptation. In the following one example is given why further adaptation is still needed.
For mobile communication systems which do not use incremental redundancy, the coding rate is usually around ½ and ⅓. Type II/III schemes use lower code rates for the first code block. Prior art systems for incremental redundancy are using a fixed coding rate for each code block. For instance, each code block could have a fixed code rate of 1. Assuming no acknowledgement, the overall coding rate (after subsequent combining) will decrease with each retransmission to r=1, ½, ⅓, ¼ and so on.
Thus, compared to Type I ARQ; incremental redundancy schemes have more retransmissions because the redundancy added per code block (with each retransmission) is smaller in Type II/III schemes. For a good adaptation granularity (coding rate to the channel condition) the code rate of a single code block should be high. The number of retransmissions will increase but the overall code rate will be nearer the optimum coding value at this particular moment.
There are several problems that come up with such design criteria:
First of all the number of retransmissions that have to be requested over the feedback channel is large and leads to an increase of the signaling overhead on the feedback channel. Further, the delay until a whole PDU is successfully decoded increases by the round trip delay RTD time with each retransmission. Furthermore, the memory requirements increase with the number of retransmissions that are proportional to the time needed for storing single code blocks. Moreover, if a high code rate is assumed for the first code block, e.g. r=1, there will be near 100% retransmission in bad channel conditions because this data rate is designed for good channel conditions. On the other hand, if a low code rate is assumed for the first code block, e.g. r=½, there will be fewer retransmissions, but the gain will be relatively small compared to hybrid Type I ARQ.
Besides incremental redundancy, there are other known techniques of adaptive coding. However, these prior art adaptive coding schemes do not consider the behaviour of the ARQ Type II/III scheme where the code can be split into multiple code blocks. Since there will be a gain from the time diversity of the multiple code blocks the required coding rate for hybrid ARQ Type I scheme will be different from hybrid ARQ Type II/III schemes.